| Growth hacking is hard. We had to learn a few tricks to grow our Hacker News alternative (https://laarc.io) Suppose you were to start a site similar to HN. How would you get the word out? The most reliable way to grow is to have an audience (or access to one). But they have to be interested in what you're showing, else you're little better than a spammer. Looking over the traffic for the last month (https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav) the spikes were from comments posted to lobse.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/jqkqwb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c... https://lobste.rs/s/kx4ojt/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c... This won't keep working, but it might have been enough. The site seems to be spreading through word of mouth now, and about 400 people show up each day. Communities are also a strange thing to grow. Grow too fast, and you'll spoil it. Ditto if you grow from the wrong source of people. Fundamentally, you have to have a product that users love so much that they spontaneously tell their friends about it. But press coverage – or at least social media coverage – seems to matter a lot. You probably need both. We've been using https://playbook.samaltman.com/ as a mantra, and it's been effective so far. But it's only been a month. We'd like to try Michael's advice next: http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/getting-press-for-your-sta... |
First and most obviously, the new product needs to be objectively better in key ways that people care about, preferably multiple key ways.
Second, the audience must be above some threshold of dissatisfaction with the current product. There must be a sufficient pain point for a sufficient part of the audience. It cannot be merely a "geez it might be nice if X", but an actual "damn, this is annoying...". And, obviously, your new product must address it.
If there is no significant pain point, you have no chance of gaining any traction. Even if the switching cost is essentially zero, you have no real chance.
Trying for a better HN? Maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't seen any big issues, nor anybody complaining about issues. So, I wish you luck, but it seems you may have put a lot of effort into something no one really wants; might be best to consider taking the huge amount you've just learned and pivot to a new target...